by Alex Raizman
“Look, I won’t be joining you in whatever you get up to next, Moloch or the soldiers.” Crystal chuckled “Sounds like a bloody band name. A band named by wankers. I guess it would be ‘Moloch and the Soldiers’, but you get my point.”
Dianmu walked over and put a hand on Crystal’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?” she asked, echoing Athena.
Crystal took a deep breath. “I have to deal with something in my nanoverse.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “I mean, I get that, but...that’ll only take a couple minutes, right? It’s not like it’s going to be a huge delay.”
“And we cannot afford to divide,” Horus said, his voice tight. “You are one of the best warriors I’ve met, and you want to run and hide in your nanoverse? When did you become a coward?”
“I didn’t,” Crystal said quietly. She visibly steeled herself, and then said, “Switch to real display.”
Before anyone could say anything else, the false display melted away and revealed the real state of the nanoverse.
Ryan swallowed hard. “It looks like…”
“Enki’s fused Nanoverses,” Athena finished.
“What the hell happened?” Horus snarled, obviously furious. “This isn’t...this is unnatural.”
“Quiet yourself,” Athena said, rising. “Obviously she doesn’t know, or she would have fixed it already.”
“If she can,” Anansi said, eyes were wide with horror.
“I should have said something sooner,” Crystal whispered. “I thought...I thought I could just pop in and fix it. Every time I tried, though, it came back worse than before. Something in my nanoverse is sick, and I don’t know how to heal it.”
“I’m so sorry,” Dianmu said quietly.
“Thanks.” Crystal gently shrugged Dianmu’s hand off her shoulder. “I’d like to tell myself it’s a side effect of...of being as old as I am. That we’re not supposed to live this long, and it’s been rotting away at my nanoverse. But it started right after I destroyed Enki’s nanoverse.”
“Somehow that corrupted yours,” Athena said.
Crystal nodded. “Somehow, it did. And the corruption is getting worse. Back in Shadu? When I had to kill Resheph to give him a chance to resurrect away from his body, with his nanoverse?”
Ryan nodded for her to go on.
“Well, I loved it. It felt so good to end a divine life like that. For a moment, I seriously considered putting him out of his misery permanently. None of you would have had to know I did it. Just bring his nanoverse into mine and snuff it out. And that isn’t the only crazy thought I’ve had lately. Whatever’s happening here...it’s affecting me, too.” Crystal reached up and wiped at her eyes. “I can’t be trusted until this is dealt with.”
“Then we should leave,” Horus snapped. “If you can’t be trusted...Crystal, we’re in your staging area.”
“That’s why I’m telling you right now,” Crystal said. “I wasn’t going to, not even after what I was tempted to do with Resheph...but since you walked in here, I’ve been considering dropping us into my nanoverse’s time stream. And then...I don’t know. Doing something. It’s like an itch in the back of my head.”
Isabel raised a hand to her mouth in horror. Ryan immediately understood. She’d slept here the entire night. If Crystal had snapped then-
“We need to get out of here,” Anansi announced.
“No,” Dianmu said firmly. “We’ll finish the discussion here, and then we’ll leave. I trust Crystal with my life. Even now. She realized the temptation was there, and she took the correct steps. Despite whatever is trying to influence her, she has resisted.”
Crystal winced and looked around the room. When she met Ryan’s eyes, he nodded.
“You are the strongest person I’ve ever met,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel but knew she needed. “Without a doubt. Besides, if you were going to break, you would have already.”
“I agree,” Athena said. “We will discuss the fact that you hid this from us, Crystal, but not until you’ve dealt with it.”
“I trust you,” Isabel added.
“Thanks,” Crystal said again, wiping her eyes.
“Wonderful,” Horus said sarcastically, rising “Then I’d like to get this resolved before Crystal snaps and murders us all. Crystal, give me a whiteboard.”
For a moment, Ryan seriously considered the pros and cons of punching Horus as hard as he could. “What is wrong with you?” he asked instead.
“You mentioned this yourself, Nascent, when you told the story of your fight with Enki. Every idea goes up.” Horus looked pointedly at Crystal. She sighed and pushed a few buttons, causing a whiteboard to appear in her staging area, complete with markers.
“Now. Obviously, Crystal needs to deal with this mess,” Horus said, writing “Crystal” and “Clean up your shit” on the board. “For the rest of us, there are three options.”
Ryan didn’t interrupt Horus as he scribbled on the board, muttering to himself. Instead, he just watched, trying to get his anger under control. When Horus was done, all three options were listed, with the previously mentioned pros and cons weighed for each.
“Now,” Horus said, stepping back and studying the list. “Looking at it this way, it’s obvious what we must do.”
“Here it comes,” Ryan muttered.
“We must go after the super-soldiers,” Horus said sourly.
“I’m sorry, what?” Athena asked.
“All of you have been thinking about what you personally want. Ryan wants revenge for the attack at his sister’s. Anansi wants revenge for his friend. Athena, you want to retrieve your kin. Dianmu...” Horus paused to consider, then nodded. “Of course. You’re not concerned with tactics. You want the option that you believe is safest for the mortals in the Core.”
“And that’s wrong?” Dianmu asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Yes,” Horus said simply. “We have a ticking clock. Armageddon looms. This is not the time to be squeamish. We need decisive action. What is a possible threat to mortals, when weighed against their total annihilation?”
“You were only advocating for Moloch because you wanted to find Bast,” Athena said.
“Yes,” Horus shrugged. “Someone has to be the first to pull their head out of their ass.”
“And you figured it was finally your turn?” Crystal said. “You’ve had it up yours since you started working with us.”
At least Horus had the decency to flush. “None of you have fought in modern times. Not in war,” he said defensively. “You’re all thinking in terms of long campaigns, but that’s not what we have here. We have a series of engagements against possible targets. We’re not an army, we’re special forces. If we had an army, I think either the two war goddesses would have seen this first.”
Ryan realized that was the closest to an apology they were going to get from Horus and decided to make a concession. “Seen what first? I’m not arguing Horus, especially not when you’re on my side right now, but I’m trying to understand why.”
Horus pointed to the section labeled “Tartarus”. “We don’t know for certain the Olympians are there. No, Athena, don’t object. We don’t. I’ll grant that it’s likely, but we need certainty right now.” He pointed to the section labeled “Moloch”. “We don’t know where he is, either. But we can lure these ‘super-soldiers’ out. We can choose our engagement. That removes a threat from the board and gives Moloch time to make a mistake and expose himself.”
Athena grimaced. “He’s right. It would be foolish to go into Tartarus without Crystal anyway. Given the change in circumstances, pursuing the super-soldiers does seem to be the best course.”
Dianmu studied the board and sighed. “Fine. Though we should make every effort to limit the risk to others.” Everyone nodded, even Horus. Dianmu looked towards Ryan. “I don’t suppose you know how to lure them?”
“That, unfortunately, is pretty obvious to me,” Ryan said, slumping a bit. You’re an asshole for even thinking this, Ryan thought. �
��If I was the U.S. Government, and I had access to my entire social media history, and I was monitoring the people I might go visit, there’s one other person besides Isabel I’d be watching.”
***
“Okay, so, a grande mocha frappuccino. No, wait, a venti. Wait, hang on, should probably get a grande. Yeah, grande.”
Jacqueline Weaver shifted impatiently as the man in front of her dithered about the size of his coffee. Couldn’t he have figured out what he wanted while waiting for the dozen people ahead of them to order? It had been bad enough listening to him change the content of the order three times, but now the size? If Jacqueline didn’t get some caffeine soon, she was going to murder him.
“Hold on...maybe I could get a venti with skim milk. That probably has about the same amount of calories as a grande with whole milk, right?”
“Yes,” Katie, the barista, answered quickly. Jacqueline had no idea if it was true, and she suspected that Katie didn’t either. She was wearing had one of those glazed customer service smiles that meant the poor girl was screaming internally.
“That’s it then. For sure.”
Thank heaven, Jacqueline thought. Please don’t ask him if he wants anything else, Katie.
“Okay,” Katie said, “that’ll be-”
“Hold on, I also need a, um…” the man turned around and yelled into the seating area. “Hey, Rachael! What did you want again?”
You have got to be kidding me, Jacqueline thought. If this whole mess is about to happen again, in stereo, so help me I’ll…
“Vanilla latte with almond milk,” a pretty blonde girl yelled back.
“What size?”
“The big one!”
The man turned back to the counter. “And a venti-”
“Got it,” Katie interrupted. “Name?”
“Steve.”
Finally, finally, Steve moved out of the way and gave Jacqueline a chance to order.
“Good morning, Katie,” she said, giving the girl a sympathetic look. “I’ll just have a venti caramel mocha, no whip, double shot of espresso.” Sotto voice, she added, “I’m certain about the size.”
Katie didn’t laugh, but she did exhale sharply and genuinely smile, so Jacqueline counted it as a win.
On a workday, Jacqueline would grab the cup and dash back out to her car, but on Saturdays she made a point of thoroughly enjoying the experience, settling at a table and sipping slowly while she read. When Kurt was in town, he often joined her. Today he was in Tokyo trying to finalize a contract, so she planned to stay for at least three chapters and two venti mochas.
It was one of her little slices of heaven, and as Jacqueline snagged the last empty table and pulled out her Kindle, she dared to think nothing could ruin the experience.
“So apparently no one died, but Jesus Christ, they shot missiles into an apartment building,” Steve’s voice boomed from the table next to hers.
Jacqueline closed her eyes and silently cursed Murphy, Fate’s scheming vizier who loved punishing such hubristic thoughts.
“It’s totally crazy,” Rachael agreed. “There’s no way to be sure that was safe. So damn wrong.”
Change the topic, change the topic, please please change the damn topic. Jacqueline prayed.
“I dunno about wrong,” Steve said. “I mean...dude dropped a nuke on Canada. What kind of asshole does that?”
You could talk about anything else. Literally anything else in the world. Maybe you could have an in-depth discussion of how the coffee is going to give you irritable bowel syndrome.
“Smith dropped a nuke on that Enki guy,” Rachael countered. “That guy was the bad guy, remember?”
“Yeah, according to Smith. How do we know we can trust him?”
I just wanted a couple hours to myself. I did not want to think about my ex-boyfriend who happens to be public enemy number one.
“Well-”
Another table opened up on the far side of the room, and Jacqueline made a beeline for it. It was too late, though. Now she was thinking about it, yet again.
Jacqueline couldn’t blame everyone for talking about Ryan and everything associated with him. The appearance of literal gods, monsters fighting outside hotels, zombies overrunning a town in Texas, military assaults on apartment buildings...all of it was the kind of thing you only got in movies, and when the latest Avengers film came out, Jacqueline was more than happy to join in the endless discussions about that. When it was happening in real life, of course it would dominate the conversation.
Jacqueline couldn’t enjoy it the way so many others seemed to, though. For starters, she was keenly aware of the very real loss of life that had happened. So many people seemed to gloss over that, for all the “Remember Grant” bumper stickers that were appearing on cars. It was horrible and tragic, yes, but it happened to other people, and that lent most people a detachment that Jacqueline couldn’t match.
Partially because she knew one of the players. Her ex-boyfriend, Ryan.
Everyone was talking about Ryan. She couldn’t escape it, no matter how much she wanted to. To listen to everyone talk, he was either a literal manifestation of Satan or the second coming of Christ. There was no middle ground.
Except Jacqueline knew that wasn’t the case. Ryan wasn’t a saint, and he certainly wasn’t the devil. He was a high strung guy, always looking over his shoulder, and prone to forgetting important dates if you didn’t remind him six times. He was also a sweetheart who always wanted to make people laugh, a good friend, and a fundamentally decent person.
Or at least, he had been. The man she’d seen on the news, issuing a challenge to Enki for a showdown on a remote Canadian island, had looked and sounded like the man she knew, but he’d been radiating confidence he had never shown when she knew him. It was jarring, like hearing a dog meow.
They’d been close friends before they dated, and inseparable while they were together. After the breakup, though, they’d cut off all contact. At first, it was too hard, for both of them, to be around each other. After that, it had been too weird. For a long time, they’d only heard about each other through mutual friends. Ryan had eventually isolated himself from their social circle, and their only interactions were liking the occasional Facebook post.
It was a mistake to tag him in that video, Jacqueline thought, not for the first time. People had noticed she’d been on his friends lists, and reporters had called and emailed asking questions. Thankfully, none of them had figured out they used to date, or they probably would have been hounding her relentlessly.
But she’d wanted Ryan to see the video. Everyone had been debating if Ryan, Enki, Moloch, or the others were villains or heroes. It had been constant. Yet the media had immediately portrayed Anansi as a monster. If he was, she wanted Ryan to keep an eye out. If he wasn’t...well, Jacqueline knew Ryan. If Anansi wasn’t a bad guy, Ryan would give him a fair chance.
You were supposed to be reading, she reminded herself. Naomi Novik is fantastic, you’re loving this book, why aren’t you focusing on it?
She didn’t have any leftover feelings for Ryan. He wasn’t the one that got away. Kurt had been the one that got away, and Jacqueline had waited for him to return from Dubai so she could get him back. She loved her husband with all her heart. But she still cared for Ryan. He’d been a good friend, and aside from his refusal to address his mental health issues and inability to remember her birthday, he’d been a good boyfriend. She was worried about him.
